Monday, February 25, 2013

What if we were to be Judged?

So, I have always denied being a straight up Atheist. Oh, I am an Atheist but that is not all I am, in regards to metaphysics or the divinity. I am also an "Ignostic" (the view that before we can discuss the question of whether or not there is a "God" we must first properly define the word), and a Scientific Pantheist (a belief that holds that the universe is in itself divine but that there is no Godhead or consciousness. Similar to the beliefs of Spinoza and Einstein).

But sometimes, not often, I like to do a thought experiment. I imagine the most Godlike god concept I can bring myself to posit seriously, The Deist. Deism, the belief that reason and observation of the natural world are sufficient to determine the existence of God but rejecting revelation or interference in the universe after creation. The Deist God, basically, created the universe and then had a sandwich someplace else.

Well, my thought experiment is, assuming the Deistic God were correct, what if It came back. What if we are nothing more then an experiment? What if this deity comes back to judge the petri dish which our universe would be? Not to send out immortal "souls" to Heaven or Hell or what have you, no. To decide if this petri dish was a good deal or a bad deal. What did we accomplish?

I would like to think we would make this imaginary creator happy. Our planet alone has reached its own satellite beyond our protective atmosphere. We have walked on another celestial body. We have created amazing machines which we have used to explore other planets and sent these deep into the recesses of space just to learn. We crossed the great oceans, flew through the skies and then to other planets. There is little real world benefit aside from knowing things - understanding.

We split the atom and looked inside. Sure we found terrible destruction and devastation but we also learned about the building blocks of reality. We discovered the relationship between matter and energy and broken the universe down to 1.616199 times ten to the negative thirty fifth meters. Infinitesimally small. We explore the nature of reality. We are introspective in the truest sense of the word. Looking to see what makes us up - what makes everything up.

Sure, we still kill for personal profit or power. We bomb women and children in the name of liberty and freedom. I never said that we were done with our travel. Were not perfect. We have not solved starvation or disease. But, we put a damper on it.

If I were a Deity and I came down to judge mankind I think I would be pleased and proud of my creation. We have used our resources, explored our world, created Gods and Magic, and dispelled it when it became more hindrance than benefit.

I am proud of my species. A bunch of brutally violent, daydreaming, chimps in pants have traveled into space and have worked out the deepest recesses of matter and the nature of reality its self. We have conquered our environment, cooperated with our environment, and been subjugated by it but we have always found a way to move forward. Via force, cooperation or redirection. Human kind has found a way.

And myself, would this imagined creator deity be pleased with me? That is stupid. My existence is of such little importance that it is only my participation in these grand endeavors, then the results of those which could bless or damn me. Any deity worth the title would not even be aware of my individual existence. We are. Humans. What have we done together? What has this sad little pack animal, evolved from rodents too small to be killed by a meteorite 65 million years ago, been able to accomplish. I think a lot.

This all happened before our current exponential increase in population and before we realized that things that oil, gas, coal, phosphate and even freshwater are, at a global level, limited resources.

By mid-century, I expect that, as the CSIS report "The Age of Consequences" put it: "Human fertility may collapse in economically advanced regions, as the consequence of increasingly difficult living conditions and of general loss of hope for the longer term."

^ But on the bright side, that's a negative feedback to counter explosive growth, isn't it?

Wow! Do I ever see things differently. I simply cannot brush off with the ease with which you seem capable, things like allowing 26,000 children to die every single day from preventable causes. And the list goes on and on and on and on. The exponential growth of greed and personal corruption nauseates me to the point of thinking we are devolving, not evolving. To me, until we are able to love our neighbour as ourselves, going to the moon is meaningless. Utterly meaningless.

Thesauros, I think you do. We all do. We have to. The best we can do is try to make changes. But if you say you are awake every night crying over the uncountable dead then I say you are a liar. And if you are not then I call you a hypocrite. At least I admit the truth about myself. Until you do that your world of delusion will allow more and more to die. How many of those children did you save today?

Brings me to the eddie izzard quote "When we landed on the moon, that was the point where God should have come up and said hello. Because if you invent some creatures, put them on the blue one and they make it to the grey one, you f*ckin turn up and say well done."